Bengals sticking with Ryan Finley for short-term future

The Cincinnati Bengals are going to continue with Ryan Finley as their starting quarterback.

Although he had a couple of ill-advised throws against Baltimore, Finley showed promise. However, taking on a lacking Raiders defense, Finley looked far from confident in the pocket and did nothing to help sustain drives.

Against Oakland in his first start on the road, Finley threw for 115 yards and one interception. What was even more concerning was his accuracy, completing just 13 passes. Finley dropped back 31 times for a 41% completion percentage.

Moving forward for the short term, there will be no changes though.

“Ryan is our starter this week for Pittsburgh,” Taylor said according to John Fay of the Cincinnati Enquirer. The Bengals’ first-year head coach did note that it’s difficult to look past coming weeks as well.

“Some of those incompletions are missed throws. Some of them – we had three drops, two competitive drops, so that’s five right there. We had a couple throw-aways. There are some things that factor into (his low percentage). I don’t always look at whatever the completion percentage was and say, ‘He was only accurate this percentage of the time.’ That’s not the way we look at it, and sometimes that’s misleading,” Taylor said in a team release following the game.

Obviously the Bengals still have long-time starter Andy Dalton on the sidelines. And, if we’re honest, the Bengals could’ve likely taken down the Raiders with Dalton behind center.

The league’s only winless team, Cincinnati is now playing for the 2020 NFL Draft. They don’t have much to hope for with this painful season coming to an end in just over a month.

There’s no reason to shy away from starting Finley. After all, it’ll be important to rule him out as an option as the team hopefully selects a quarterback with their first-round pick in 2020.